Utterance production and interpretation: A discourse-pragmatic study on pragmatic markers in English public speeches

Abstract

Despite the studies of the past three decades on pragmatic markers in conversational interaction, markers in monologues have been relatively neglected as a research topic. This study carries out an investigation into pragmatic markers in monologues, a corpus of 30 public speeches, with an attempt to explore their features in distribution and functions in utterance production and interpretation. The result reveals pragmatic markers are extensively used in public speeches, with an average frequency of at least 3 markers in 100 words. Among the nine different categories of pragmatic markers in the present study, elaborative markers are found to have the highest frequency, while conversational management markers the lowest. Interestingly, assessment markers and deference markers are found with an equal frequency. As to individual markers, and is found to be the highest in frequency. The findings also suggest that pragmatic markers in public speeches function mostly to illustrate a statement or to explain or reason a message, to indicate a contrast between two messages in discourse, to show the sequence of a series of events, and to make an inference or draw a conclusion, etc. For the hearers, they give clues to the interpretation of speech discourse at both local and global level, signaling where the speech is, and what is the relationship between the preceding and upcoming discourse.